Holding it IN

Moving from California to Montana had it's advantages,
one of them being much cooler temperatures (I happen
to *really dislike* heat).  But some things we're only just
getting used to.

Example the first:  our family, accustomed to crime and its prevention,
would seem to the native Montanan to be highly paranoid, out here
where it makes front page headlines when someone is murdered.

For instance, we always lock our car doors when we go into Albertsons. Apparently this is something nobody else does.  In fact,
it seems nobody even knows what those locks are for in the first
place.  Once as we were getting out of the car at a restaurant
I locked the doors.  Some guy getting into the car next to us
asked "what the hell is that clicky button thing?"

It isn't just fear of crime either;  we from California have these
sanitation issues.  My prime example is public restrooms.
You know those little paper toilet seat cover thingys?  They don't exist
here in Montana.  I used to go in there and wet my pants just thinking
about all the diseases I would get if I sat there.

Then I realized something:  that seat has probably never been used.
Apparently Montanans don't take a dump in public restrooms.  It
simply isn't done.  And once I got used to that, I had no trouble dumping
my loads.  However, I have stopped again, because taking a dump in a public
restroom simply isn't done, and I've gotten quite a few funny looks
from native Montanans in there merely to use the urinals.

Then there's cold weather.  We from California used to think that 0
degrees Fahrenheit (sorry, folks from other countries where the other
scale is used... you'll just have to find a conversion scale online
somewhere) was pretty damn cold - after all, in California it never went below
forty degrees.  Ever.

Now we've experienced 20 below, and I'm told it goes down to 40 below in
the "dead" of winter (incidentally, forty below is the same on *both*
temperature scales).  In any case, my folks are deathly afraid of weather,
here where there are all kinds of snowstorms, high winds, and 40 below
weather.  They won't go out in anything below 40 degrees (that's
positive 40, not negative 40...) without a heavy coat, huge boots, and
dorky-looking hats on.  They don't like being in the wind, and they are scared to death of driving in a snowstorm.  We were driving home when it started
snowing and we were going about twenty miles per hour (once again,
foreigners, check for an online conversion scale or something... sorry!).
*Everyone* was passing us.

Of course, on the reverse side you have the people who are just plain stupid.
For example, some native Montanans recently drove off a 60-foot cliff.  Oops.
Someone died there;  I don't want to be harsh, but THAT WAS STUPID.  So is
driving a hundred miles per hour in a white-out snowstorm.  So is getting
arrested for DUI and yelling epithets against Jewish people... oops, wrong state.
I guess stupidity exists everywhere, but in very different forms.

In any case, it's time for me to go home now.  I've been holding it in much
too long... these public restrooms!!!!!